Ah Ah…Ah Ah..Ah..Ah OOooh. Fuck . Yeah. Right. Right. Harder. Ugh…Fuck me harder! I…love…It. I…I…Oooh fuck ahhhhhhhh. Fuck. Fuck.
Jeanie Shoop, enjoying the receiving end of a vigorous fucking from a married neighbor, yowled during the intercourse like an alley-cat raping an ostrich. She’d done it for as far back as she could remember. Mrs. Shoop, in enduring her ten-plus (!) years of marriage to one Arnold “Arnie” H. Shoop, had been forced into a front row seat for the slow decline, and eventual death of her sexual self. Jeanie justified recent, multiple affairs with partners of both sexes as a way of reanimating a part of her marriage which her husband could no longer seem to fathom. For his part, Mr. Shoop hadn't the time for shit-giving with regards to his wife, he was much too stressed about his job. Things in Shoop-ville hadn’t always been so bleak. Jeanie could remember a time, not so long ago, when being a higher-up at Goldman Sachs came with a certain panache, and no small measure of respect and perks for both the executive and his lady-wife. These days she mostly told people that Arnie managed a hedge fund, and then changed the subject.
That’s what she’d told the neighbor who was fucking her now: “He manages a hedge fund, or something. He stays away from here most weekdays. I’m all alooone…”. She was bolting down a second glass of iced Kendal Jackson Chardonnay as she spoke. The alcohol adding a metric ton of suggestive subtext to her words. The neighbor, Officer Jon “BigJon” Moreland, knew a slutty drunken proposition when he heard one. He moved in, snatched Mrs. Shoop's wine glass, spilled the second part of her third chardonnay -on purpose – into Jeanie’s important parts, and drank it down with his whole face.
***
Arnie came home, saw the Chief’s blacked out Caprice Classic in his driveway, and walked into his house. He caught them, Chief Moreland and Mrs. Shoop, attached at the privates, swaddled between Arnie’s comically expensive 2000 thread-count sheets, shouting orgasmic profanities through goofy chardonnay smiles.
There had been more Kendall Jackson mixed in with the sex and the eating. Arnie could smell it under the sweat and fornication scents. The booze had begat experimentation, the cuckolds trying gamely for a physically demanding sexual position called “Indian Wrestling” just as Arnie walked in. Arnie couldn’t have known but BigJon and Jeannie had only just learned it, moments before, from a Penthouse Presents that Moreland had put on at some point during the fucking. Nobody took notice, but the actors in the Penthouse thing seemed to be having an easier time of “Indian Wrestling”, which involved the female’s head and shoulders forming a weird tripod on the floor while she held her ass suspended above her head. The pornography was still gasping away in the background as the inevitable confrontation broke out.
Oh…Oh…Oh…Oh…Oooooooooo. Woah! Oh…Oh…OooOH!…
There was an awkward moment there, as the old man surveyed the scene. Weird exchanged glances and uncomfortable silence proliferated until Arnie put a stop to them pulling a tiny, corroded revolver on his naked wife and his old friend, and weeping – intensely - the whole time. Moreland watched the gun hand quiver as Arnie began eulogizing his marriage:
I should’ve known. I never treated you right. I was a pig! Fuck you!! Fuck you Jeanie! ! I should have been a better father! A better man! Slut! Fucking slut!! All I ever wanted was you to love me Jeanie! All I ever wanted was you…Ahh! Oh!
BigJon couldn’t help interrupting:
Dude you’ve been asking me to fuck your wife since I moved here! I was only…You ask everybody to fuck your wi…
Jeanie cut him off, turned on her husband, said nothing.
Moreland could hear the porn:
(Oh…Oh…Oh…oooooooooooooooOOOOOO-OH! SHIT! FUCK! SHIT! FUCK! DONKEY!...)
He couldn’t help but stare at his old buddy Shoop, whose unintentionally hilarious gesticulations when enraged had been amusing him since they were both in single digits. Shoop rewarded BigJon’s attention unwittingly, living up to billing with both feet stomping, arms flinging around like Elvis, screaming:
With me WATCHING you shithead! I have to SAY that!!? What kind of fucking idiot would ask a friend to have an affair with his FUCKING, FUCKING wife!!??
Bigjon over-nodded his enthusiastic agreement, intoning:
Exactly! Exactly!
Then Arnie shot him, and ruined the whole afternoon.
***
Arnie Shoop did NOT mean to fire his gun. He’d never fired it before. It had been stashed in the Shoop closet going back decades. He’d come by the ancient weapon just after graduating Harvard Business Law as “protection” during the first and last cross-country drive the Shoops would ever undertake as man and wife. That was 1984, and the tiny revolver had cost him twenty-five dollars. The man who sold it to him freely admitted never having seen it fired.
Exhuming the weapon from a hidden place deep in the Shoop attic earlier that morning, Arnie’s plans for the thing had been purely theatrical. He would brandish, perhaps even point, but never discharge the little piece. He would yell, scream, perhaps he'd cry in a furious, threateningly masculine way, and then he would kick the lovers out of his house and get on with the rest of his life, whatever that would bring.
Shoop was just past five feet tall with a fleshy, rotund midsection the color of wet newspaper. Ten months before, he’d commissioned a private investigation of his wife’s indiscretions which put Jon Moreland at a manageable six-two, 230 pounds, with an “athletic” physique. Arnie, who’d worked alongside Chief Moreland in the rotted bureaucracy of South Kingston, RI. for the last decade, knew different. The “friend” fucking his wife went a good 6’6”, and was composed – mainly - of hairy, often mean, always heavily intoxicated, muscle. Arnie’s insignificant sidearm, pathetic as it was, held poor Shoop’s only chance for odds-evening a physical confrontation with the giant cop.
***
(OhOhOhOh…o…O…o…O…o…eek!)
Jeanie didn’t care about anything that happened to BigJon, and only a smidge more for what became of her husband, but when the gun went off she heard a tiny, desperate sounding “Ma! Ma? Mommy!” coming from the basement, and was seized by instinctual desire to protect her offspring. Arnie’s daughter Elizabeth, three years old that very week, had been watching a “Baby Einstein” DVD in her play yard two floors down when the drama kicked off.
At the POP of the dirty old firearm, Jeanie sprang from bed stained and sweaty, in complete nakedness. She hit the floor, seeing the moves, efficient and logical in her mind's slow motion. Three graceful strides past her husband and her lover, and she'd have the stairs. She would protect her child. She would take the stairs in great bunches, leaning way into the descent and using her hands to bounce off the…
***
(oh…Oh…oh…Woooooooooooof Meeeeeee….Wooooo…Oh...Oh…Ayeeee…)
WHACK!!
Moreland caught Jeanie Shoop with a furious 180-degree backhand, snapping the rotation at his waist and springing up, hard. The blow was mostly instinct, and a hair short of perfectly placed, but it caught Shoop’s wife between her nose and temple. She went down on her back, eyes open.
(Oh…Oh…Oh…oooooOOOOgh!)
BigJon took a split split-second to admire his cat-like-ness, quickly replaying the event in his mind and scanning the moving parts with a twisted kind of pride.
The gun had been a surprise, it’s actual use doubly so. But Chief Moreland was detail oriented, scanning possibilities, scenarios, and outcomes the very moment Shoop had drawn down on him. Lucky – BigJon understood – was the officer who found himself at gunpoint, but not yet shot. Each passing second drags the gunman deeper into the risk-pool. Realization of this immutable law usually came as a surprise to gun pointer and point-ee alike. The huge cop, however, had been around some. He couldn’t help smiling a predatory smile at Arnie Shoop in the well-lit bedrom. For almost a whole minute, the room was silent save for the Penthouse actors, still getting it on demonstratively on the bedroom TV. Then there was an impossibly loud noise, and an improbably bright white flash. BigJon felt a hot streak across his shoulder, and warm moisture on his face.
(Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh…Oh…Oh…EEE…Oh!..eh?)
Before he shot him, BigJon Moreland had been prepared to go easy on his old buddy Shoop. For one thing, Officer Moreland couldn’t help but take some responsibility for making love to Shoop’s wife in secret for most of the twelve years he’d known her. The Chief was just that kind of guy, empathetic. Also, Shoop and BigJon had recently tag-teamed on a $25,000 haul from the Stop and Shop corporation, an appreciation-tithe for “project managing” efforts at a new grocery-commerce center in South County. Hurting him would necessitate killing the poor bastard, and Moreland knew the neighbors were probably – even then - taking to front lawns and driveways up and down the street with iPhones and Droids in-hand. Small arms fire in daylight hours was, in his experience, a siren song few Rhode Islanders ever bothered resisting.
***
Arnie Shoop was more surprised than anybody else involved at his shooting of Officer Moreland. He’d known BigJon almost all his life, and both men had leveraged their relationship to obscene personal benefit. Unfortunately for Shoop the adultery was revealed at an inconvenient career juncture, adding a few degrees of stressful context to an already explosive situation. Arnie Shoop hadn’t actually made any money from working in almost two years. Instead, he’d been casting about desperately trying to find any venue through which he could recoup his horrendous losses from the year 2009. That was the year the Chinese had bailed, the worthless slopey fucks, and left him holding his dick, along with swimming pools-full of worthless mortgage lots. Arnie’s “salary” in 2010 was negative 4.2 million, the projected worth of all the worthless things he’d been hired by Goldman to sell, and now could not.
It wasn’t greed fueling Arnold Shoop's late nights and interminable weekends these past year. No, the thing that kept Shoop going these days was something much stronger and darker: pure red fear. Not fear for possibilities, or the phantom-fear of things that may be, but fear of today. Fear of NOW. He hadn’t a penny to his name, and if he died suddenly the lawyers would erase his remaining family behind a generational financial slaughter-wave of major federal fraud. Goldman was about to tank, and the press knew his name. They would open the books and the databases would be laid bare. VP level was where the exposure risk began, everybody knew that. Arnie Shoop had been a VP at GS for almost a decade.
So Shoop shot BigJon Moreland. Almost. He’d aimed for the heart, knowing that hurting the monstrous cop would almost certainly necessitate killing him. He wanted to get it over with quickly. By now the nosy unemployed would be dashing to their front-lawns clutching AV equipment. Rhode Islanders loved daylight gunplay the way most states loved parades. Instead, Arnie’s awful shitty luck continued fucking up his awful, shitty life in awful, shitty ways: The old revolver exploded in his poor, cheated-on hands the moment he pulled the trigger.
***
Looking back a few days later, Moreland had the whole affair tipping at the exploding gun. There were tense moments before, God knows, but things weren’t fully-ramped until Arnie Shoop blew up his right hand. BigJon had been watching that hand, because in the whole entirety of the afternoon’s fuckery, the most volatile threat was Shoop’s shaky old gun-claw. BigJon could see it gnarling into an on-purpose trigger-pull that might look accidental to a jury.
BigJon was shaken from hating the nosy townsfolk by the shot, mega-loud, way close, in the smallish Shoop master bedroom. There was a flash, and instant, weird pressure around his arm from the bullet fragment passing close. Moreland’s wits returned the next moment and he began to see things unfolding slowly. As the shot rang out, Shoop was inside three feet, directly in front of him, and the slut Jeanie was trying to shoot the gap. BigJon had instinctively ducked back and to his left to avoid getting shot, twisting thick, hi-tensile torque into his frame with the motion. He waited a beat, feigning being possibly dead in order to gain the mechanical advantage, then snapped his head and shoulders back the other way, massive arm following like a crowbar swinging on a bullwhip. There was a dull PONK, like a wooden bat striking an oak tree, then the sound of Jeanie crashing into a combination hardwood floor / wounded husband. Moreland didn’t have to look down to confirm the lady was over for the day, possibly much longer. Instead he took a fraction of a second to study Shoop underneath her. He’d hit the deck when his hand exploded, so Moreland hadn’t had a chance to take stock in the misfire’s effects.
The gun had turned itself into a grenade. Instead of focusing the powder charge on the metallic jacket of a shell and propelling the tiny piece of metal forward with accuracy, the powder had moistened and seeped, unchecked, as the weathered piece rotted in careless storage. Firing had touched off a charge that burst outward in many directions, sending a miniscule bead of steal glancing towards Chief Moreland, then injecting super-heated, molten jacketing through the palm of Shoop’s right hand, before sending shards of microscopic alloy tumbling through the ruin at super-sonic velocity. The poor bastard shrieked like a lunatic and dropped to the floor. He ended up on his back, partly covered by his unconscious wife. His back arched and flexed with pain spasms, his face turning pale-purple under the withering gaze of Officer Moreland who seemed entranced into reverent silence by the pain and carnage. He watched the whole writhing pile of Shoop-flesh twitch and shudder. There were – he noted with delight - tiny fountains of blood jetting from an ever-changing pattern of locations inside Arnie’s squeezing fist. For a whole minute the Chief considered raping all three Shoops and posting it on Youtube. Then Elizabeth intoned, once more, from the basement. Her voice came creeping up the stairs, slithering into his mind like a timid mouse in a cage full of hungry cats. She said:
Mommy? Is daddy here? Mommy!
And that moment was the exact moment when BigJon Moreland came upon the most important idea of his life.
***
The odd thing, BigJon Moreland thought as he handcuffed Mr. and Mrs. Arnie Shoop to their toddler Elizabeth, was that he’d rehearsed this very scene in his own head at least a hundred times and never once come close to the successful realization of that lengthy prep-work. Probably - he thought while dragging the three of them through the front hallway by the handcuff chain - had something to do with the fact that Arnie shot him. To be fair – he reflected while kicking the Shoops down their five grainy 1970’s concrete front steps – Arnie had missed, but should that reality really serve to leaven his retaliatory strike?
No! Fuck NO!
Moreland said it out loud, kicking and dragging the Shoop family across their gravel driveway. He bellowed once more:
Fuck fuckin’ THAT!
Now Jon was flexi-fastening Jeanie’s hand to the bottom handle of the Shoop garage, paying no mind to the thirty-odd eyewitnesses on the six front lawns behind him. He finished up and looked down at his handy work. Mr Shoop was basically speaking in tounges. One side of his face looking like 100 mph road rash, Moreland saw glass and pebbles glistening in the raw flesh. Jeannie was trying to comfort the three year old, who’d finally stopped yelling. BigJon took a final second, plumbing the farthest reaches of his mind for any ghost of a second thought. Finding none, he turned heal, and stalked away towards his Caprice Classic.
***
You’re a fucking idiot.
BigJon wasn’t surprised to see his father sitting on the bench beside him as he swung into the police car. The bastard had been dead almost thirty years, but he’d been coming around ever since, usually in moments when his presence would be most inconvenient for his youngest son Jon. Moreland took a beat to size his dad up. He was dressed, as usual, like he was auditioning for COPS. Jean cut-offs at 1982 hemline, a plastic handle of Popov in his right hand and a glass pipe with brown stains in his left. There was a sudden aroma of burning plastic in the car. Moreland junior:
Right. A fuckin idiot. Kind of busy right now Pop.
His father was sparking the bowl part of his pipe with a tiny blow-torch, couldn’t answer right away. BigJon watched him hold the smoke, and exhale invisible vapor. Finally he spoke:
Lookee: they’re all goin' back inside. They think this is over. Ha!
BigJon didn’t miss a beat:
What’s that about “think”?? What else to be done?
His attempted mis-direct failed immediately in his ghost-father’s wiggy gaze:
Senior: Right…”What else” indeed. You know the expression about bullshitting a bullshiter?
Junior: Never heard it…
Senior: Liar.
Junior: Go away pop.
And just like that, it began. Moreland swung the cop car’s hood around like a passenger jet after final clearance. A moment later he was facing the Shoops, still cowering and handcuffed to their house. He revved the cop engine, spared a last glance to his right: No ghost dad, and beyond that, no neighbor-folk staring from their lawn. Chief Moreland reached down to the cop dash, cranked the cop stereo: Eddie Van Halen exploding like a solar flare inside the car. Then he gave the tree shifter a yank, dipped the throttle, pitching forward like an angry bull from a chute.
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